Shapefile 2 vectorfile ?

oceatoon

Posted 06 June 2005 - 04:01 PM

oceatoon

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Location:Pyla Sur Mer, France

Interests:Fluids and Flow

France

Hi
I not at all from GIS, so please excuse me,
I have retreived the famous NOAA shoreline .shp file ,Can someone please explain to me how to transform it into a vectoriel file ? which software does the conversion ?

once this is done how would my Lat / Long reference be set onto to it?
can I plot directly ?
will Lat / long be x,y on the map , is this dependent to the type of projection?

I would love to find a little tutorial for geopositioning points on such a data map ?
does anybody know of a good link to learn about this ?
Thanks for the thoughts
Regards
Tibor

The easiest way would be to have your lat/long points in an spreadsheet. Using a GIS software or with Mapublisher you could get your NOAA coastline into an illustration program and while your at it plot your x/y coordinates at the same time.

I do not know a way that circumvents these software tools. What do you have at your disposal in terms of software?

Hans van der Maarel

Posted 10 June 2005 - 08:34 AM

Hans van der Maarel

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Natural Earth is georeferenced (GeoTIFF) and supplied in a simple lat/lon projection. This will combine with vector data in any GIS or cartographic package. Keep in mind though that the files are *huge*. The full-res, all-options on are 750 Mb per hemisphere.

oceatoon

Posted 10 June 2005 - 03:55 PM

oceatoon

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Validated Member

6 posts

Location:Pyla Sur Mer, France

Interests:Fluids and Flow

France

Yes the size factor was part of my doubts about this but positionning should be proportionnal if I scale the map down as it is vectorial , no ?
Do you think I would be better off using the GTOPO30 files or the ESRI ones ?

Posted 11 June 2005 - 02:56 AM

Yes the size factor was part of my doubts about this but positionning should be proportionnal if I scale the map down as it is vectorial , no ?

Actually, it's raster. Scaling down will make the size smaller, but will also ruin the georeferencing information that's in there, unless you use a GIS package for that.

As for what you can better use instead of Natural Earth, it depends a bit on the resolution you want for your final product.

The photoblog site you referred to seems to use 2 zoom steps, so you'd definately need 2 levels of data. The 2nd level seemed to be primarily VMAP (or similar) data. I would suggest preparing one 'base' layer, with (for example) just the terrain data and a 'zoom' layer with more detailed terrain, country borders, rivers, cities etc.

oceatoon

Posted 15 June 2005 - 04:32 AM

well the level of detail I need would be in four level views : Europe, Country, Region, and Province

in the lowest level there will only be major cities and my content as dots with no extra data, but I would like nicely drawned countries, the class A looks are important, I'll try to make it modular so that all graphical configuration is done from an external xml config file.

NOAA data is good for the two first layers but then what sort of data can I use or is there one data I can use for all views ?

I seem to understand that the FlashPhotoModule is cut up in layers of corresponding to the Longitudes and the Latitudes and reassemble according to the view point. is this a standard way of doing this ?

Thanks Martin about the projection for Natural Earth, I read a bit about projections and map formats, and since I'm swimming in questions, should I just fix myself to the format(WSG84,NAD) of the map I choose, and the longitude latitude will be just like posiitonning x / y on a referential ?
do you have any good links to such documents ?

Thank you very much for the help, I really appreciate it.
Regards
Tibor